Page 3 of The Space Between

Jeanie had been daydreaming about Leonard Pickles for months. Even when she was engrossed in her astronomy books,or as she was carefully writing out answers to her homework, she was thinking of him. As a grown woman she would chuckle at the fact that she’d once loved a boy named Leonard Pickles so much that she’d doodled “Jeanie Pickles” all over her diary at home, but in May 1954, Leo Pickles was the apple of her eye and she’d told no one—not even her best friend Carol Fairchild.

In English class, Leo raised his long arm in the air and held up one finger to get the teacher’s attention. “I believe that Fitzgerald used Jay Gatsby to help readers understand that the American Dream was attainable for anyone.”

“Okay, let’s use that as a jumping off point for this discussion,” Miss Chambers said, turning to the chalkboard to write something in her neat, looping penmanship.

But Jeanie’s attention was elsewhere: it was on the back of Leo’s long neck. It was on his softly curved ears. It was on the way his shoulder blades were visible through the back of his cotton uniform shirt. And it was definitely on the strong bulge of his biceps as he leaned over to pull a book from the bag that rested at his feet.

In grade school, Leo had been a quiet kid with big ears. He was good at sports and nice to everyone. But by age seventeen, he’d become the tall, athletic, smart, kind boy who had grown into his ears—and everything else. And he made Jeanie swoon.

So sure was she that they would go to the junior prom together that Jeanie had picked out the dress she wanted to wear to the dance on a trip into Chicago one weekend with her mother and her six-year-old brother and sister. There it was in the window of Macy’s on State Street: a gorgeous sky blue confection with shimmering flecks of glitter sprinkled all over the tulle skirt. Beside her, in his tuxedo, Jeanie knew that Leo Pickles would be the most handsome escort at the prom. Together, they would stop traffic.

In the weeks leading up to prom, Jeanie did everything she could to make sure that Leonard noticed her: she was there after school, holding her books in her arms when he played a pickup game of basketball with the other boys, and she was standing around in the hall, re-shelving the same books in her locker over and over as she waited for him to come out of his classes. When he finally talked to her one day and offered to walk her home, Jeanie was beside herself with joy. Finally, Leonard Pickles had realized that they were meant to be together.

As they walked down the tree-lined streets on that early day in May, Leo bounced his basketball on the sidewalk, asking Jeanie questions and waiting for each of her answers like he really cared about what she had to say. By the time she got home, Jeanie's heart was full, and she was bubbling over with excitement.

Leonard Pickles. Leonard Pickles. Leonard Pickles. Her brain played his name on repeat as she helped her mother set the table for dinner. His face was burned into her mind’s eye as she washed her face before bed. The long lope of his walk made her smile as she climbed into bed each night. No other boy had ever featured larger in her mind than the science books she loved, and never had she spent so much time just dreaming about a boy. For the first time in her life, Jeanie Florence was smitten.

If she’d dared to tell anyone, she might have even said she was in love.

"How was school today, my friends?" Wendell Macklin asked as he spooned peas onto his plate and passed the bowl to Jeanie's little sister.

Jeanie stayed quiet and let her siblings answer the question, because her mind was far too busy imagining what she and Leonard would look like as they walked into the gym togetheron the night of the junior prom. Lately, this was all she did when she was at home: stay quiet, and daydream about Leo.

In the weeks that followed, Jeanie and Leo spent more time together. Nothing official—no dates—but they walked home, met up in the halls, and asked each other how things were going. It all seemed to Jeanie like the build-up to some sort of great and momentous romance, and she had nearly worked up the nerve to ask her mother to take her back into the city to see if the dress was still in the window at Macy's on the day she walked out the side door of the school building and into the bright afternoon sunshine.

There, beneath a tree, stood Carol Fairchild. She had her back pressed against the rough bark of the tree trunk, and her textbooks were clutched to her chest. She was laughing and looking up at a boy who stood almost uncomfortably close to her, and as Jeanie stopped in her tracks to watch, she realized that boy was none other than Leonard Pickles. Carol and Leo were gazing into one another’s eyes in a way that sent a jolt through Jeanie’s entire body.

Jeanie's heart stopped in her chest as she watched the dappled sunlight fall onto Carol's blonde hair. The wind lifted the edge of Carol's calf-length skirt as her joyous laughter rang out across the courtyard. Leo reached out and put a hand to the end of Carol's hair, extracting a single green leaf that had landed there.

Jeanie stood there, barely breathing. She couldn't make her legs move, and she couldn't stop watching them. At that moment, there was no question in her mind that Carol would be going to the prom with Leo. That they'd hold each other close on the dance floor in the gym that night, swaying to a love song as metallic stars swung on long bits of string overhead. By the end of the night, Leo would have kissed Carol, and Jeanie's futurewould be cemented: she would live the rest of her life without ever becoming Mrs. Leonard Pickles.

But the look on Carol’s face was enough for Jeanie; after all that Carol had been through, seeing her smile like that and hearing her laughter did something to Jeanie that felt like someone was wringing water out of her heart. Her friend, who had spent most of her life angry and protecting herself from her mother’s harsh treatment, looked happy. Really and truly happy. Despite Carol’s good looks, Jeanie had never seen her with a boy (although boys were always looking in Carol’s direction, always clocking her whereabouts), and seeing Carol now with Leo was just…right. They looked like they belonged together.

Jeanie harbored a deep sense of disappointment and loss, but she accepted this fate almost instantaneously. Soon, Carol would come to her gushing about Leonard Pickles and telling her that Leo had invited her to the prom, and she, Jeanie Florence, would be happy for her friend. She had to be, because that’s how real friends behaved.

Jeanie wanted to escape as quickly as possible without either Leo or Carol seeing her, so she turned around and walked back towards the double doors, yanking at the handle roughly. It wouldn't budge; Jeanie was locked out. She rattled the door as tears sprang to her eyes and panic welled up in her chest. She was in no condition to speak to Leo or Carol, nor did she want to be seen.

She was about to give up on the locked door when suddenly it opened from within: Miss Chambers had heard the rattling from inside her classroom and come to see what the ruckus was all about.

“Thank you,” Jeanie whispered as she rushed past Miss Chambers, books held firmly to her chest. She hurried down the shiny floors of the empty hallway, past lockers, past both openand closed classroom doors, and straight for the other side of the building.

When she reached the doors that led to the parking lot, she burst through them without slowing down.

From that day forward, Jeanie wouldn’t let herself be distracted by a boy again. Or by anything else.

CHAPTER 1

June 1964

JEANIE

Workingfor NASA is everything Jeanie dreamed it would be. It is also a crash course in gender relations, sexism, and the way some (most) men simply cannot look at a woman and see anything but thighs and breasts and a pair of hands that should be making dinner and changing diapers instead of calculating fuel consumption and space landing parameters.

"You ready for the weekend, Florence?" Peter Abernathy, a fellow engineer, climbs into the elevator with Jeanie and punches the button that she's already pressed. She squashes the instinct to roll her eyes at this.

"I most definitely am," Jeanie says pleasantly. "How about you?"

As the elevator doors slide closed, Jeanie is treated to a long-winded monologue on Peter's golf game, his favorite Scotch, the woman he's currently dating, and the project he's working on with the Aeronautics Research Mission team. Not once between the time the elevator car starts its ascent and the time it stops does Peter ask Jeanie anything about herself; she'd known instinctively that "You ready for the weekend?" was simply code for "Let me tell you all about my weekend."

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